


"These Dreams"

by farad



Series: Albie 2 [1]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-12-07 19:16:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20981000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farad/pseuds/farad
Summary: Josiah and Vin talk, and Josiah remembers too much.For the Halloween 2019 prompt, "Any; Any; "The prince hides his face, in these dreams in the mist" (_These Dreams_, by Heart)This is from a universe that I have been working on for several years. It is sci-fi, and very very dark. Which is why I thought this snippet might be appropriate for Halloween. (notes on the universe are at the end, if you wish to read them first)





	"These Dreams"

“You ever wonder if we’re being punished?”

The question quiet and slow, so much so that at first, Josiah wasn’t sure he’d actually heard it or simply imagined it. It was so much a part of the questions he asked himself daily that actually hearing it was hard to believe.

Especially from the person in the room with him.

He drew in a breath and turned to look at his companion, the question still echoing in his mind.

Vin was standing before the window, staring out into the dusk. That wasn’t unusual; when he was inside, he was always close to a window, as close as he could be to the outside. Nathan believed that, among all the other problems Vin had, he’d become claustrophobic.

Josiah believed that Vin was simply afraid of being trapped. Again. As he had been in that last battle, the one that had taken away so much of him.

The one where he’d lost the only things that mattered to him.

Before he could find a way to ask Vin if he’d actually spoken, the other man turned to him. “Figured as you got faith, you’d be the one to ask. I ain’t sure ‘bout your beliefs, so I don’t mean to throw any insult. But it’s something I keep finding in my head, ‘specially on the nights I ain’t sleeping.”

Josiah glanced back down at the book before him – an actual book, not a digital copy. It was one of his most precious possessions, this paper and print incarnation of the faith to which he adhered. Despite the long years he had been in service to the Confederation.

Or, maybe, because of those long years.

“You’re not insulting me,” he said slowly, buying time to consider the answer, and noting that Vin was admitting to cognizance of several things: that he wasn’t sleeping, that he did have cogent thoughts wen he wasn’t sleeping, and that he was concerned for Josiah’s feelings.

None of those things was new, but they were still rare. For the past seven years, Vin’s perceptions of reality – his sanity – was so often skewed by the traumas of that eighth year that no one believed he could think clearly.

No one but Josiah.

Vin tilted his head to one side, a sign that he was waiting, but also a sign that he was impatient. Nathan believed that in the aftermath of that last attack, the attempt to tear the biochip out of his brain, Vin’s attention span, his ability to hold any semblance of organized thought, had been destroyed.

Josiah knew that much of that was Nathan’s own guilt; he’d been the one to create the biochips, and the one in Vin and the one in Chris had been a test run of what was, at the time, believed to be the future of military technology: two soldiers linked in a form of telepathy that would allow them to function as a more effective weapon.

It hadn’t been Nathan’s fault, though, that Chris had betrayed them all, Vin most of all, falling in love with an enemy agent and almost killing Vin in the course of removing the chip that connected the two of them.

“What do you think we’re being punished for?” he asked, hoping to keep Vin’s attention focused.

The other man straightened his head and frowned. The expression pulled at his thin face, drawing down the patch over his right eye. For a time, after ‘the incident’, he had had an artificial eye, like Josiah’s own left eye. It was superior to the human eye, calculating distances, trajectories, gravitational changes, climate disturbances – it was not only an ocular device but also an information processing system.

Josiah had never questioned his own bio-hardware, appreciating it as a boon for the pain that had made it necessary to have it.

But then, he’d never had someone wrench his eye out and dig into the socket to get to something buried behind it. He didn’t have the horror – and the pain – of someone’s fingers literally ripping into his brain.

Vin had pulled the ocular implant out within weeks of awakening from the coma. He’d held a laser pistol to his head and almost pulled the trigger when the doctors had tried to sedate him to put it back in.

It was then, in the moments of negotiation for his life, that Josiah had known he was ending his career.

As had they all.

Vin turned, his one good eye blinking as he stared out into the grey of the night. “Reckon,” he said slowly, still very quiet, “we got a lot of sins to pay for. All the worlds we forced to submit to the Confederacy, all the people we killed who just wanted to live out their lives on their own terms.”

Josiah drew in a breath. The words, again, were so much like the ones in his own head. He wondered if he was speaking them, on the nights when the liquor was too good to stop drinking.

“My pa,” Vin said, but this time the words were a whisper, and Josiah barely heard them.

He knew, though, as they all did, the Vin had been a penal recruit: he’d been born on a prison planet, and by the laws of the Confederacy – by a system that none of them had really considered until Vin had come into their lives – he was bound to service in the Confederacy.

As a servant.

That was basis of his service to Chris. Though, in truth, they all knew better.

Or thought they had. When they had all believed in Chris and what they thought he stood for.

He had to say something. His own conscience was too heavy to take on Vin’s guilt, Vin’s pain. “I try to believe,” he said softly, “that we are are protected, to some degree, by our ignorance. We thought we were doing the right thing – at least, in the beginning. And now, here, we are trying to help.”

“One planet,” Vin sighed, shaking his head. “We’re helping these people – but how many planets did we fight on? How many did we - “

“Too many, yes,” Josiah said, more sharply than he’d wanted to. He had his own personal list of sins on this point. “But we are starting here. And if we can save them . . .” If they could help the indigenous people of this planet gain their independence – or at the very least, their gain their own voice in the Confederation, then it would be a start. A good start.

A way to assuage their sins.

He drew in a breath and found that he, too, was looking out into the dusk. The view was breath-taking; this world was a paradise, which was why it was a retirement community for people like them: career Confederation military, bio-tech/sentient hybrids who needed consistent weather and climate conditions to minimize bio-tech problems.

And it was a world so far out on the border of the Confederation that it might be possible, as they all hoped, to keep this from turning into an all-out war.

And if it did, they knew they would all die in it, one way or another. But then, that had always been a possibility. In some ways, they were all dying, one piece at a time

He looked down at his left hand; it was biotech, flesh and muscle, but also hardware and software. Like his eye. Like his right leg.

Like his kidney, liver, and stomach.

As much machine as man, he’d heard his last surgeon say.

Without conscious thought, he looked to Vin’s right hand – or what should have been his right hand. As with the eye, Vin also refused to wear his bio-implants. At the end of his arm was a metal hook. He refused even the pretense of an old-fashioned metal hand.

‘Pirate Vin’, as Buck had termed him. As Vin spent most of his time these days on the small boat in the cove behind their collective, there was a certain romance in it.

A romance that Vin didn’t appreciate, but the rest of them did. There was, as with everything about them now, an irony to it that seemed in keeping with their new, post-betrayal life.

Vin shifted, and with the movement, Josiah knew the other man was growing restless. This conversation had been much longer than usual for Vin, and Josiah hoped that the monitors had recorded it. He wanted Nathan to see it, to see past his guilt to the possibilities here.

“Going out,” Vin muttered, turning away from the window and walking toward the door.

“Vin,” Josiah called, though he pitched his voice low. “To answer your question: no, I don’t think we’re being punished. I refuse to believe in a power that harms.”

Vin slowed and then, just before he reached door’s sensor field, he stopped abruptly. The long braid of his hair swung against his back, making a swishing noise as it rubbed against the worn fabric of his thin shirt. “But your god ain’t the only one around, is he. I know you think so, but the people here got their own gods. People everywhere do.”

“That’s true,” Josiah agreed. “So I guess it depends on what you want to believe.” He waited a few seconds and when Vin remained still, he asked, “What do you want to believe?”

Vin turned then, not just his head but his entire body. He straightened his shoulders and met Josiah’s gaze. In the dim light of the reading lamp on Josiah’s desk, Josiah could make out the pale blue of that one eye. “I believe in him. I know y’all don’t – I know y’all think I’m crazy for what I think. And maybe I am. But I believe he’ll be back. And that he’ll explain why he did what he did.”

Before Josiah could say anything, Vin turned and left, moving so quickly that the door was hardly open when he slipped through.

Josiah sighed, watching the door reach its full retraction then start slowly forward to close. Vin wasn’t crazy, not as such. He was unpredictable, his body screwed up by what had happened that day, his mind altered by the physical rape of it and then the numerous surgeries to try to repair that damage. He was on mixtures of different drugs to control the very chemicals that made the brain work, and those probably messed him up more than anything – or so Josiah thought. He didn’t often voice it to Nathan, though, as Nathan wanted so desperately to ‘cure’ Vin.

But the belief in Chris, after all he had done to Vin, that was – well, crazy. Not even Buck, who had known Chris the longest, been through the worst with him, could see any way past the idea that Chris had betrayed them – the team, the Command, the Confederation.

And it had been Buck who had had to press the button, discharging the laser beam that destroyed the ship Chris had been using to escape what he had done to them all.

Mostly, though, what he had done to this team. They had been together for so long that they had become a legend in the service. Every one of them had almost died more than once – and come back. They had thought they were invincible.

And for the most part, they were. Until they had been destroyed from within. Until they had been forced to kill one of their own.

He shook his head, as if he could fling away the memories of those last months in the service. Those days that had brought it all to an end.

Vin was crazy if he believed that Chris was coming back. He was dead. Vin hadn’t seen it – he’d been clinging to his life, fighting to stay alive.

But the rest of them had. They all watched the light beam streak through the darkness of space and the resulting explosion when its energy and collided with that of the engine of the small ship just barely at the edge of the weapon’s range.

He looked down to his book, seeking something else to think about. Anything else.

_Secret conspiracy is the devil's idea, through which he seeks to hurt those who believed. However, he cannot hurt them against God's will. In God the believers shall trust. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen._

Josiah sighed and looked toward the closed door. Faith and trust. Two things in short supply here, for everyone but Vin. But then, every prophet had been deemed crazy in his time. 

He closed the book and turned off the lamp. Sitting in the growing darkness, he wondered searched, once more, for his own faith  and prayed not to relived that day, once more, in his nightmares. 

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of this universe is that the seven came together over time as a Spec-Ops unit in a far-flung future. I did not model it on any particular universe, but you could see it as a variation of the Firefly concept, or Star Wars, or - well, any of them. The stories take place after the climatic events described in this story, when the remaining five (JD is not yet here), have retired from the service and, sharing guilt and responsibility for what happened with Chris, live together in a communal estate on a 'paradise' planet where the indigenous people are not treated as equals - again, as you might infer.


End file.
